Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Will the Ron Paul Channel Get Crushed?

Marc Clair of LionsOfLiberty.com emails:
Robert, 
It appears the first episode of the Ron Paul Channel is on YouTube.

[Link to pirated youtube video removed from text of email-RW]

At first I thought it was a free preview, and had planned to post it on my site, but upon
further inspection it appears this channel is not affiliated with Ron Paul and is not official.
The channel even links back to RonPaul.com, which we all know is not owned or run by Ron Paul.

I'm curious about your take on this as it relates to your IP stance. Is it up to Ron Paul and
Ron Paul Channel to figure out how to prevent something like this? It seems that if every episode can be slapped onto YouTube the next day by these days it could easily crush the business model.

Thanks 
Marc Clair
Editor In Chief
LionsOfLiberty.com
First as a believer in intellectual property protection, and specifically in this case copyright protection, I would object to anyone copying from the Ron Paul Channel, without the direct permission of Ron Paul, or the entity that holds the rights to the RPC broadcast.

My thoughts on this are completely in line with Murray Rothbard who wrote in Man, Economy and State (Chapter 10: section 7)
On the free market[...]There would[...]be copyright for any inventor or creator who made use of it, and this copyright would be per­petual, not limited to a certain number of years.
Indeed as do I, Rothbard saw any infringement  on copyright as theft:
. Let us consider copyright. A man writes a book or composes music. When he publishes the book or sheet of music, he imprints on the first page the word “copyright.” This indicates that any man who agrees to purchase this product also agrees as part of the exchange not to recopy or reproduce this work for sale. In other words, the author does not sell his property out­right to the buyer; he sells it on condition that the buyer not reproduce it for sale. Since the buyer does not buy the property outright, but only on this condition, any infringement of the con­tract by him or a subsequent buyer is implicit theft and would be treated accordingly on the free market. The copyright is there­fore a logical device of property right on the free market.
Thus, unless permission has been specifically granted to post the video on youtube, there is a clear stream of libertarian scholarship holding that the posting is theft.

As for the remedies Ron Paul, or the RPC organization, have, they certainly can pursue the thieves in a court of law. Also as I understand it, if youtube is contacted they may pull a video if they consider it in violation of copyright. It will have to be up to Ron Paul or the RPC organization to determine if it is worth the effort to use either of these remedies.

It is held in parts of the anti-IP community that because it is difficult to enforce intellectual property rights law that IP law should be wiped off the books. This is simply central planning. It should be left to every victim of theft whether or not he wants to pursue damages, not some overseers who want to establish the limits for everyone on the ability to pursue damages. How is that libertarian?

As for the RPC business model, itself, obviously to the degree that daily broadcasts are pirated and published on youtube, RPC will lose revenue. It will have to be up to RP and the RPC organization to determine if it is worthwhile to continue production if revenues are not high enough because of pirating and if it is difficult to protect against piracy. It may be that the revenue loss is not that great and RP decides to continue the channel or RP may decide to change the model to make RPC, say, advertiser supported.

All these are decisions that will have to be made by RP and the RPC organization. That this decision making will have to be made also erases the the idea advanced by anti-IP advocates that there is no harm done by copying material, because the original creator of the material still has his original copy. We can see the weakness in that argument most clearly in this discussion about RPC. Great damage to RPC can be done by reproducing the broadcasts. It can create a great fall off in revenue, possibly to the point where the channel will have to be shutdown.

14 comments:

  1. On the free market[...]There would[...]be copyright for any inventor or creator who made use of it

    I have no problem with an explicit contract between buyer and seller concerning the permitted use of a "creation". (As Mises noted in Bureaucracy, artists often are anti market because of a inflated view of their importance) In a free market authors who placed strict conditions on the use of their product would suffer by receiving a lower price for their product. Government enforced copyright protection protects artists from suffering this damage. That and widespread disregard for copyright restrictions.

    In this particular case I agree YouTube should and probably will remove the video.

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  2. The only weakness I can see in the pro-IP argument is the "lost revenue" argument. There is no guarantee that the viewer of the pirated material would have ever become a paying customer, and there is no reasonable expectation of ownership of that customer. If anything, the quality of the content, the delivery method, timeliness of availability, and loyalty of support would seem to move viewers to actually pay for the service, eventually, if the service is good; or not, if the service is not good.

    In any event, chasing rogue YouTube pirates seems a waste of RPC resources, while the pirated videos could possibly serve as advertizing teasers. RPC should announce a plan to put all old content online for free (perhaps Netflix? Roku?), and only ask for monthly fees for new/current episodes.

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    Replies
    1. A Nonymouse is right.

      I have no problem with RPC deciding to charge a subscription from a philosophical standpoint - they of course can do what they want.

      Aggressively going after pirates, however, would seem to be extremely short-sighted in the modern internet-age. As mentioned, pirated-content does NOT equal lost sales.

      Personally, I feel like the type of people who will pay for the channel are the exact opposite of the people who would benefit the most from the channel. Additionally, anyone who may be leaning toward libertarianism may not think it's worth $9 a month for something they aren't sure of.

      There are tons of ways to monetize their channel - and for someone like RP, it should be easy to pull in enough viewers to make alternate business models viable; I hope to see some of that thinking in the near future.

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    2. It costs money to broadcast a network. The subscription is their way to keep this important channel operating. Anyone taking away from that hurts himself and the Constitutional message just as much as the rest of us.

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    3. The other way to monetize the channel would be selling advertising and that game doesn't go over well if advertisers try to influence content. The subscription lets him be independent of outside lobbyists and influences.

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  3. Bob,

    Returning to part of the Rothbard quote (my emphasis): "This indicates that any man ***who agrees*** to purchase this product also agrees as part of the exchange not to recopy or reproduce this work for sale."

    Here is the problem:

    What about the individual who did not agree to those given terms? Let us use this Ron Paul channel as an example. To summarize, Ron Paul is promoting his own channel and is charging a fee to access this content. Presumably, Ron Paul stipulated in his terms that buyers of the content cannot share it without his explicit permission. This is fine and dandy and acceptable in the free market.

    However, what if person A (who agreed to Ron Paul's terms) decides to post the content up on Youtube, thus violating the terms and sharing it with the world? Certainly person A could be subjected to legal action - even in a free market because he violated a signed contract. However, say person B (who did not agree to Ron Paul's terms) obtains the Youtube content and then shares that content with persons C and D (who also did not agree with Ron Paul's term). In this situation, Ron Paul's contractual terms no longer carry any legal bearing because persons B, C, and D did not agree to those stipulated terms.

    Of course, your response to this would be something like "subject person A to legal action, which would stop the leak." But it's not so simple in the digital age. The content is out there. It cannot be contained. And this is precisely where the traditional concept of enforcing IP as property rights breaks down. In short, to enforce IP law in a broad manner would necessarily involve subjecting individuals to terms that they did not explicitly sign onto. In other words: a government.

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  4. It's extremely difficult, in the Internet Age, to prevent the spread of your digital "product." I say embrace it and find another way to monetize your efforts.

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  5. Is the primary motivation of the Ron Paul channel to disperse knowledge, and possibly understanding, of the libertarian word view or is it to make money?

    If the former, bring on the pirates!

    If the latter, bring on the pirates!! The greater distribution will bring greater financial reward - with the help of the free market and imbedded advertising, as Google has amply demonstarted.

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  6. "That this decision making will have to be made also erases the the idea advanced by anti-IP advocates that there is no harm done by copying material, because the original creator of the material still has his original copy. We can see the weakness in that argument most clearly in this discussion about RPC. Great damage to RPC can be done by reproducing the broadcasts. It can create a great fall off in revenue, possibly to the point where the channel will have to be shutdown. "

    I'm fuzzy on the use of the word 'harm' here: there is no 'harm' to the content (it's just copied) and there's no 'harm' to RP or the computers operating the channel, there is only some sort of unmeasurable economic 'harm'.

    Playing devil's advocate here, how is this different from the harm inflicted by a very-successful Widget 2.0 competitor who steals all the customers from the company making Widget 1.0 causing them to shut down?

    Yes, I understand the examples are vastly different.

    My point is, can you use 'economic harm' as a solid reason for prosecuting any sort crime when there is no physical harm to any person or property?

    I don't feel this is a valid argument for either side in the IP debate.

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  7. Anon,

    His answer will be to ignore that part of the issue as he always does. Wenzel thinks he can use the knowledge of thousands of years totally free and owe no one anything, but once he SUPPOSEDLY adds to it just a tiny bit, then he can sue anyone that dare repeat or use his tiny contribution.

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  8. Anti-IP types need to address these arguments

    https://strangerousthoughts.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/the-economic-principles-of-intellectual-property-and-the-fallacies-of-intellectual-communism/

    if they wish to be taken seriously.

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  9. Robert Wenzel writes "...obviously, to the degree that the daily broadcasts are pirated and published on YouTube, RPC will lose revenue." I don't think that can be known with certainty at all. In fact, the opposite may end up being true. The Grateful Dead, for example, ended up reaping great profits from first letting fans freely record their concerts. These bootleg recordings spread and and brought in more and more fans, many of whom became paying customers of the Dead's music and merchandise.

    Furthermore, Ron Paul arguably wouldn't even be in the position he's in now were it not for all the(free)YouTube videos that spurred his great following.

    By the way, I'm wondering if Robert Wenzel makes any distinction between selling "pirated material" and simply giving it away for free, as is being done in this case with the RPC YouTube video.

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    Replies
    1. This is totally idiotic. There is a big difference between giving away a book online and having people buy the physical book and the same with giving away music online and having people attend a concert. If you give away the video there is no incentive to buy the video.

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  10. Free markets and competition in broadcasting says the RPC will fail. I can watch Stossel, Ben Swann and Gary Franchi on Next News Network and get the libertarian views for free.

    As Ron Paul said, "People vote with their bellies".

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